Home energy storage enters a new era

Richard Martin, MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
Driven by the explosion of residential solar power, the market for home energy storage—which attracted little interest until earlier this year, when Tesla announced its Powerwall battery—is suddenly looking crowded.
This week at the Solar Power International show, in Anaheim, a company called SimpliPhi Power is unveiling a lightweight battery system for homes and small businesses that offers a longer life span than other lithium-ion batteries and doesn’t require expensive cooling and ventilation systems.
SimpliPhi’s bid comes a few weeks after another energy storage provider, Orison, released its design for a small plug-and-play battery system that, unlike the SimpliPhi and Powerwall options, does not require elaborate installation or permits for a home or small commercial setting.
Orison is not actually selling its products yet; the company plans to launch a Kickstarter campaign to take pre-orders and expects to begin selling in early 2016. Its innovations center on the batteries’ controls and communication systems: simply plugged into a wall socket, the battery enables a bidirectional flow of electricity, charging itself when power is flowing and sending power into the home circuits when it is not.
The growing popularity of residential solar panels is increasing interest in batteries that could store electricity from those installations. In the future, such storage systems could benefit homeowners, by giving them more control over how and when they obtain the power they need, while helping utilities by shifting demand to off-peak hours and smoothing out the load on the system.
For the moment, despite Tesla’s splashy entry into the market, such batteries still generally remain too expensive and cumbersome for most consumers. SolarCity, the largest solar provider in the United States, began offering a combined solar and storage system using Powerwall this summer, but it’s available only in newly built homes for now. And earlier this year rival SunEdison acquired Solar Grid Storage, an integrator of solar arrays and energy storage—but it’s not yet clear exactly what that will mean for the market in home energy storage.
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